The Mishin Diaries – A western perspective Charles P.Vick October 22, 1993 was a cold, overcast day in New York City. We (Charles Vick and David Woods) had made special arrangements with the staff of Sotheby’s to view the collection of items that they had assembled for a huge Russian Space History auction. We had come to see such fascinating items as the Cosmos-1443 TKS reentry capsule, an engineering version of the Voskhod-2 EVA airlock, a Krechet lunar program space suit, and many other items. These were all stored in a big warehouse, some still in their original shipping crates from Russia. Following that we went over to the Sotheby’s main office to see still more of the smaller items: space suits, desktop models, autographed items, etc. In one conference room there was a rather sad looking cardboard box, filled with a collection of 31 small, well worn books. To the uneducated eye, these would seem to be of no special interest and of little value compared with the other items that had been assembled for the auction. However, these were the set of personal diaries that had been made available by Vasily Mishin, covering the period from 1960 to 1974. To historical researchers, they represented one of the most valuable items there. With only a day to review all of the items, there was not much of an opportunity to examine the diaries in detail. Nevertheless, it was obvious that they contained a wealth of information about the day to day happenings during one of the most fascinating periods in time: the depth of the Cold War when Russia and America were competing for political supremacy in the arena of world opinion. The auction was held on December 11, 1993, following a three day period when all of the items were out on display for the public to examine in detail. To some this was an opportunity to own a piece of history, with a successful bid. And bid they did. 226 individual items were sold for a grand total of $6.8 million: far exceeding Sotheby’s original estimate. Prices ranged from $633 for the Lap Plotting Board that Vyacheslav Zudov had used on Soyuz-23 to $1,652,500 for the Soyuz TM-10 reentry capsule. Many came away delighted with what they had been able to obtain. For others like us, however it was a sad day, because here were items, Russian national treasures in many cases, that were disappearing into private collections that should have remained in the hands of the Russian people. There were others who shared that opinion as well: one of them being the famous American industrialist: H. Ross Perot. After the auction, a small collection of these items went on tour around the United States. It was later revealed that Mr. Perot had recognized the significance of many of the auction items and had out bid all of the others to assemble them into a personal collection of his own. This was not a private collection that would disappear from public view forever. Instead, it was his wish that they remain together in the hopes that one day they could be returned to Russia, to a facility much like the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC where many of them are on display today. The Smithsonian display includes copies of a number of pages from the Mishin Diaries, one of many items that Mr. Perot made a special point to obtain. Each of the items submitted for the Sotheby’s auction had to come with a letter of authenticity and a brief description of the significance of the item. That description was then used to assemble the catalog of all of the various items. In the catalog, Vasily Mishin is quoted as saying that the diaries “took an utmost effort of mine. I was thinking of destroying them. They are my private diary, which I started in 1958-59, and kept up through 1974. Some of the entries were made promptly in the wake of events, others written down as recollections. I put my soul into them.” The catalog went on to say that “A brief survey of Mishin’s diaries gives some idea of the riches they hold. (The first volume) begins with a sort of memoir or summary of the Soviet space program in 1960 1 and ’61, and delves shortly into outline form, and then into a chronology. The first portion was written not long after Gagarin’s epochal flight in April 1961; and we may well imagine that it was at this time that Mishin began to see how his place at the heart of great events afforded him a special privilege as their chronicler”. The description concluded with: “Far beyond anything in all the memoirs and interviews that have been published in Moscow and elsewhere, these documents present this historic era from an entirely new dimension, full of authentic details and precise dating. They are written by the very hand that steered the Soviet space program for years; they are strictly contemporary with the pioneering events they chronicle; and they are extraordinarily frank and unsullied by the kind of secrecy and misinformation that cloaks so much of the Soviet space program. Any attempt at telling the history of the space race without the material in these notebooks will be second-rate.” One would think that with such a conclusion as that, that a small army of researchers would have immediately examined the diaries, each trying to glean every last bit of information out of them. Strangely, that proved not to be the case. Copies of the diaries were made available for a number of people and some information was extracted from them, but no one ever published any of his or her findings from any of those examinations. It appeared that the information content hidden in the pages of those tiny 31 volumes would eventually be lost to time. Soon after World War II had ended, Europe became divided and the Cold War set in, with each side desperately trying to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the other side. The United States resorted to surveillance aircraft and later to reconnaissance satellites to try to locate Soviet assets and then make an assessment of their significance. One of the destinations of the last U-2 surveillance flight over the Soviet Union was the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Previous overflights had shown it to be an ever expanding facility where missile tests and space launches were being conducted. Listening posts in Turkey and Iran could pick up telemetry from these launches once they came over the horizon. If it was not encrypted, it was possible to determine what some of the downlink information contained. With this information plus whatever imagery could be obtained from above, a better assessment began to immerge of the true measure of the perceived threat. Imagery from the first series of American reconnaissance satellites was eventually declassified and made available to the public. Many of these Corona missions included passes over Baikonur, giving researchers an opportunity to develop detailed facility layouts; a timeline of when they were built; and when they were out in the open, a look at the launch vehicles that would use those facilities. Vasily Mishin had taken over the OKB-1 programs being run by Sergey Korolov following his death in 1966. The American Apollo lunar program was well underway at that point and Mishin was faced with a monumental task of trying to compete with a fraction of comparable resources and funding. Nevertheless a giant vehicle assembly building was completed under his direction as well as two huge launch pads to accommodate the N-1 rocket that would hopefully carry two cosmonauts to the Moon before the Americans could. Because the first stage was so big, the decision was made to forego building a separate test facility for it, and instead to try to discover any problems with a series of full-up launches. In hindsight, this would prove to be a mistake, because each of the four launch attempts of the N-1 resulted in failure due to various problems with the first stage. A fifth launch was being made ready in the mid- 1970’s, but by then Mishin had been replaced by Valentine Glushko. Glushko, who had despised the manned lunar program, set about obliterating anything associated with that program. Four N-1 boosters in various stages of completion were deliberately cut up with torches rather than completed and launched, and all historical documentation of the program was directed to be destroyed: all in an effort to erase any record of the program from the pages of history. At that point Mishin was tired of all of the political battles and infighting that he had to endure during those years, so he left the space program and accepted a position as the Chair of the Rocket and Space Systems Department of the Aerospace School at Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI). In 1989 he accepted a position as the Rector's Advisor where he remained for a few short years until his death in 2001. 2 That might have been the end of the story, except for the end of the Soviet Union and Perestroika that now allowed people to start discussing these programs in public. Mishin was now free to begin writing about the N1-L3 program, describing in detail what the mission profile was to be with specific performance data about the giant N1 launch vehicle.